Joseph Campbell's Quest for the Grail

The Masks of God: Creative Mythology by Joseph Campbell

Review by: Alfred Sundel
The Sewanee Review, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Winter, 1970), pp. 211-216
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 ARTS AND LETTERS 211

clusively as fragments of a great confession. Gittings is superb. Tak

ing issue with Bate's contention that in seeking distraction from Tom's
illness Keats launched into the first Hyperion prematurely, Gittings
argues convincingly that Keats's preparation for the epic was, in fact,
too long, that he could not finish it because he had "evolved beyond
the scope of his poem". Yet Gittings knows the value of this grand
relinquished fragment. As he asserts?with the uncomplicated but
striking lucidity that is one of his book's chief merits?Keats was a
great writer before he was a great poet; with the opening lines of
Book One of Hyperion, the Keats of the poetry catches up with the
master of prose we see in the letters. Because Gittings is sparing of
superlatives, we feel the truth of it all the more when he calls this
beginning "one of the highest points in all writing".

JOSEPH CAMPBELL'S QUEST

FOR THE GRAIL*
By ALFRED SUNDEL

The collapse of the Roman empire in the northern reaches of west

ern Europe gave rise to an of over a long period
evolving cycle myths
of cultural regeneration that, in Joseph Campbell's opinion, paralleled
the Homeric legends that developed in the wake of the fall of Crete
and Troy. This was the Arthurian cycle, which took its impetus from
a heroic leader of the Britons in their native resistance in
against
vading Angles, Jutes, and Saxons circa 450-550 A.D. The cause of the
Britons was a lost one, and over the course of the next five to six cen
turies uncounted bards transformed Arthur into a misty, regional
superpatriot.
The Norman conquest of Saxon England in 1066 had a catalytic
effect on the legend, by now quite separate from the man, who had
become lost to fact forever. In time Geoffrey of Monmouth was ap
parently set the task of creating a new epic of Arthur for Anglo-Welsh
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, New York (The
Viking Press), 1969, 730 pages, $10.00.

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212 ARTS AND LETTERS

Norman-Breton consumption, much as Virgil had created Aeneas for

his emperor Augustus as patriotic Roman literature. Arthur emerged
a king from Geoffrey's account, his military feats inflated, even as
other accounts continued to add new bits and pieces to the growing
body of Arthuriana.
But the Arthurian strain of patriotic heroism did not stir the Gallic
heart as did that of Charlemagne and of Roland. Here it was that
Chr?tien de Troyes reworked the Arthurian myths to include new blood
(already indicated by others), that is, a Round Table of Knights. He
retired Arthur and brought forth a stable of young heroes : Lancelot,
Tristan, Yvain, etc. His inventions and/or additions to the Arthurian
cycle included an ambiguous Legend of the Grail.
Whereas Chretien's principal theme was romantic love, some of
the future French and German versions developed the Grail Legend
as a religious vehicle which all but lost touch with Arthur as anything
more than a kindly old gentleman mellowed in his seat of power while
his young heroes rode forth to adventure. The Fourth Lateran Coun
of 1215 on the presence of Christ
cil doctrine in the eucharistie bread
and wine became integral to religious versions of the Grail Legend,
which was best furthered by monks.
The German poet Gottfried von Strassburg wrote Tristan some years
before the Fourth Lateran Council doctrine, as did his contemporary
Wolfram von Eschenbach with Parzifal. These two medieval master
pieces, Tristan and Parzifal, are the myths retold and explored by
Joseph Campbell in Creative Mythology, which caps a four-volume
series titled The Masks of God.
As in his pre-series book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Camp
bell's The Masks of God deals with variations on a theme; indeed, the
variations are his theme. Where the first three volumes treated varia
tions of the supernaturally divine, or aspects of the gods, the final
volume is concerned with love in the age of the troubadours. Which
is to say that, after a sweeping panorama of world mythology for
three volumes, the concluding volume has a surprisingly narrow focus.
"It is a law of symbolic life that the god beheld is a function of the
state of consciousness of the beholder," Campbell writes; and he has
shown, in his earlier series volumes, how the primitive hunters of the
Franco-Cantabrian caves "fancied relationships and covenants with
their animal neighbors" and how "primitive planters, in their gruesome
mysteries of sacrifice, burial, and supposed rebirth, imitated the order

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 ARTS AND LETTERS 213
of the vegetal world, where life springs ever anew from the womb of
the earth."

at a certain point
But in history, Campbell contends in Creative
Mythology, man attained to new ground, in the mythic sense. This
was the age of the troubadours, and "within its fold the gods and
goddesses of other days have become knights and ladies, hermits and
kings of this world, their dwellings castles." In Gottfried's Tristan,
love for love's sake became an end in itself, which Campbell views as
a mythologicalwatershed. "Love was in the air in that century of the
troubadours, shaping lives no less than tales; but the lives, specifically
and only, of those of noble heart. . . ." Of the troubadours, he has
this to say:

The whole meaning of their stanzas lay in the celebration of a

love the aim of which was neither marriage nor the dissolution of
the world. . . . The aim, rather, was life directly in the experience
of love as a refining, sublimating, mystagogic force.

Campbell has high praise for Wolfram von Eschenbach for creating a
"consciously developed secular Christian myth", in which man and
woman live for this world, each in his own heart.

In Wolfram the guide is within?for each, unique; and I see

in this the first completely intentional statement of the funda
mental mythology of modern Western man, the first sheerly indi
vidualistic mythology in the history of the human race: a my
thology of quest inwardly motivated?directed from within?where
there is no authorized way or guru to be followed or obeyed, but
are
where, for each, all ways already found, known and proven,
wrong ways, since are not his own.
they

Campbell then ventures that, with the emphasis on this world as the
true domain of love, that is, with the love of the eyes celebrated by
the troubadours, "We have here attained, I would say, new ground:
such ground as in the whole course of our long survey of the world's
primitive, Oriental and Occidental traditions has not been encountered
before."

This is a shaky limb to crawl out on, but also it would be a mistake
to assume that Campbell has really and truly surveyed "the world's
primitive, Oriental and Occidental traditions" from anything but a
his wide readings, limited point of view, a view
personal and, despite
which is interspersed in the survey in such a way that we are never

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214 ARTS AND LETTERS

quite sure how Campbel has arrived at his conclusions, which are often
sprung on the reader rather than logically developed. His claim of "new
ground" would have far more Validity if he had traced out earlier
patterns of how love had been treated before the troubadours, along
the lines, let us say, of historical perspective on love drawn in Schopen
hauer's "The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes". Campbell has
done no such thing. Thus, the "old ground" is never defined.
His first three volumes, with their overwhelming concentration on
the ancient world, stand at a far remove from the modern world, and
what is at a far remove can more easily be dealt with objectively.
For it is one thing to retell a colorful legend of ancient India, to ex
plain Bastian's theory of ethnic ideas, or to speak of a genetic response
to symbols in relation to illustrations from the past?all of which
Campbell has done notably well; it is quite another for him to deal
with matters closer to his heart and mind, matters that touch him
deeply.
His concluding volume is set in an age at the very epicenter of Celtic
Christianity, and Campbell obviously has strong feelings here. The
material he has gathered in the first three volumes, with a stunning
array of quotes from peripheral disciplines (psychology, archeology,
anthropology), is dazzling in its updated scope and arrangement, and
as ambitious, in its way, as many of the major works he cites. Herein
lies Campbell's importance. He has sketched out selected myths from
various cultures long gone from this earth, informing them with modern
scientific knowledge that opens up new dimensions for us in regard
to the people of Mohenjo-Daro, of Crete, of Sumer, indicating parallels
and connections. But this final volume abandons the survey approach
and moves forward on another track entirely, that of a conclusion which
is never satisfactorily developed amid a narrative seldom sure of its
direction when not retelling the intricate tales of Tristan and Parzifal
or leaning heavily on Joyce and Mann.
In the religious sphere, Campbell has personally overthrown all
manifestations of authority, not with reserved English logic but with
remarks that have an edge of bias, or undeveloped logic, to them.
Thus, we have comments like "the fairytale of the Old Testament"
and "the priestly tyrant Ezra" without further explanation as to what
Campbell means. Now the Old Testament contains strong historical
stretches of writing that are anything but fairytale, while the fairytale
is of Hellenistic origin in respect to Biblical literature, its influence
traced to the miracle content in the New Testament by some scholars.

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 ARTS AND LETTERS 215
Ezra was a priest-scholar (similar to Jerome), credited with saving
Judaism from internal collapse in the fourth century B.C. by a separa
tist argument. He was never a but a translator-scholar whose
tyrant,
great achievements were closing out an authorized version of much of
the Old Testament and translating it into a Vulgate form of Hebrew
for the masses. These unfortunate references do no credit to Campbell
as a surveyor of world mythologies.
In pressing his point on the rise of love in the age of the troubadours,
Campbell quotes poems far inferior to the well-known Old Testament
passage: "Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair."
This emphasizes a weakness in his argument: first, he has failed to
acknowledge the love poetry of religious literature, as if it did not exist,
although it antedated the troubadours by from 1,500 to 2,000 years;
secondly, his unfriendly references to the Old Testament at other
points add to a feeling that he has ignored the Old Testament because
he does not like it, not from a theological or or literary
philosophical
stance, which could be argued to the reader, but because it represents
something he doesn't like, which cannot be argued to the reader?and
is not. He sees it as patriarchial, punitive, stern. In fact, Campbell
displays no great knowledge of the Old Testament. For a writer who
wanders the wide world to bring home a rich bag of esoteric tidbits on
man's spiritual vision, this is certainly a glaring flaw, particularly
since he comes across as a Christian seeking small cloths of religion in
the East to patch up the holes in his own belief?that is, an Oriental
Christianity (to wit, the religion of the Jews, which he does not under
stand). Indeed, like Joyce, he comes across as a disbeliever (or tend
ing that way) so fashioned by what he disbelieves that his arguments
for disbelief tend to stay within the range of his belief. The issue is
one of limitations on his vision. How can he speak fairly of ethnic
ideas when he is so obviously deeply rooted in his own upbringing that
his final book is a classic case of what
Spengler called the Ptolemaic
viewpoint toward history, i.e., that all history revolves around Christian
Europe. After three volumes that take the reader far into other cul
tures, this is a surprise.

Now, whereas the Old Testament poet spoke of the spirit of love,
the troubadour spoke of the spirit of love. If one looks at this trans
formation without Campbell's rose-tinted glasses, love has become an
intoxicant or mind-expanding drug in the age of the troubadours. The
accent has shifted from the sacred and divine to emotional self
indulgence.
Campbell freely admits that the troubadour wrote in a dreadful age,

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 216 ARTS AND LETTERS

when rapine, loot, and murder were the order of the day. It has been
called an Age of Faith because of the enormous expenditure of the
total economy lavished on church construction (much as we arm

against communism today) ; but this optimistic appellation is debatable,

for it was much more like an Age of Fear. Prayer was offered up less
in reverence to God than out of a dire need for His protection in ward
ing off calamitous evil.
The ideal love of man and woman was celebrated by the troubadours,
then, against a background setting of knight killing knight (or others),
the male lover of the knightly legend soon gone and his child quickly
growing up into armor to replace him. The troubadours were less in
terested in the lilies of the field than in gilding the lily. Ideal love was
the opium of the nobility.

Campbell has concentrated on the gilded lily, the love element, and
ignored the hostile militaristic aspects (as anything other than heroism)
that reduced the medieval male knight not only to a machine that
killed its enemies or was killed but also to a biological r?le similar to
that of insects, for the concept of ideal love worked like that of the
whirring of wings or the chemical allure that female insects give off to
attract the male knights in order to procreate their species before they
kill or are killed.
It is his line of argument for romantic ideal love as a "secular
mythology that is today the guiding spiritual force of the European
West", with a corresponding blindness to any historical perspective
leading up to this conclusion that would take into account the reality
of the passions of the human heart as early delineated in Old Testa
ment literature (Jacob and Rachel, David and Bathsheba, Judah and
Tamar), that shifts the entire swing of the series off-center from its
original focus. No more is Campbell speaking of changing mani
festations of the sacred and the divine but of a fixation on a period, a
region, a philosophy ("love of the eyes and the heart") that, compared
to his survey of primitive, Oriental and Occidental traditions, is sud
denly ethnocentric.
Campbell seems to believe in ideal love as he believes in heroes, or,
if not to believe, certainly to be attracted beyond the point of reason.
Thus, ideal love becomes the jewel in the lotus, God is love and life
is quest. The failure to relate these ideas to the reader in other than
snatches from a lectern leaves Creative Mythology a private and un
convincing survey and a serious falling-off from the sustained level of
the earlier volumes, which remain without a final summation.

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